There are lots of realities out there

Updated 3:02 am, Friday, September 14, 2012

Seeing the world through a child's eyes is anything but easy. We were all children once, but we forget as we get socialized. We are taught about a kind of "reality" and the importance of paying attention to it, even though there are aspects of life that are just as real, although also imaginary and metaphorical.

It is moving through those worlds that is the essence of childhood. It is seeing all the worlds at once, and seeing them as equally valid. That is not, alas, a survival skill - you really do need to make a distinction, in day-to-day living, between a metaphorical train and a real train.

Not making the distinction, or thinking that the distinction is meaningless, is the essence of magical thinking. Children do magical thinking all the time, even as they go in search of the real. It is possible to think of religion as the residue of magical thinking in adult lives.

Children see metaphors as real. Children overhear snatches of conversation, misinterpret them and create a version of reality that is less than useful. Still, as with religious visions, these versions can be beautiful, striking and even true in a nonliteral way, the way a wordless song is true.

No matter where we are, no matter when we are, these are days of miracles and wonders. Seeing the unseen can enrich and fulfill our lives. Getting back into the head of a child can make our own heads seem awfully barren and literal. We still can't utilize the child-brain to navigate the real world, but we can participate in the imaginary world in strange new ways.

Two works have recently appeared on Bay Area screens that deal with the minds of children. One is the movie "Beasts of the Southern Wild"; the other is the National Theatre of London production of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." The National Theatre is doing some of the best theater in the movies; it's worth tracking them down: microsites.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ntlive.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" takes place on an island in the vast Mississippi Delta south of New Orleans, sort of Cajun wonderland. Halfway through the movie, it is destroyed by a hurricane. The child protagonist is named Hushpuppy; she lives with her father in the swamp, surrounded by other people who form her surrogate family.

One of these is a sort of juju woman, who teaches Hushpuppy about global warming and the animals who lived in other times on this planet. In Hushpuppy's mind, movingly rendered on film, some of these animals, aurochs, great feral cattle with two gigantic horns, become entrapped in ice and, millennia later when the planet warms up, are released back into the world.

The aurochs are both real and not real. They are a projection of Hushpuppy's worst fear, that her father, already sick, will die. The hurricane becomes part of the same storm that breaks the ice off the northern floes. All of it blends together with the confusing world of adults, a world that includes drunkenness, improbable schemes, fear of the outside world and a joyous approach to even the worst vicissitudes.

In the movie, the world in Hushpuppy's mind is finally made manifest, and ... well, something happens. Worth seeing what happens.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" is based on the best-selling book of the same name. Perhaps you read it; 3 million copies were sold worldwide. Here's how the book starts: "My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507."

Christopher Boone is a 15-year-old autistic boy living in Swindon, England. The book (and the play) opens with a dead dog in his quiet street. Christopher decides to become a detective and figure out who killed the dog.

The task is daunting because Christopher doesn't understand humans very well. His problem is that he has too much data flowing in. He can't read body language or facial expressions very well, because they get lost in the noise. Christopher isn't really a child, but he is unable to care for himself, and his candor is precisely childlike. He never lies, and of how many adults can that be said?

Through the extremely clever use of projections, the stage itself becomes Christopher's mind, both flat and colorless and absolutely cascading with amazing data. We begin to see what he sees, which is a lot like seeing the world through a child's eyes. And the world itself is stunning in its complexity and speed.

No wonder kids sometimes don't have time for us; they have an alternate universe to inhabit and only a few years left to live there.

It's a very strange thing that we look at, no matter whose eyes we have.

But alas! Either the locks were too large or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

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